Customizing Your Supplier Letters
You use supplier letters to notify your suppliers, purchasing agents, and purchase requestors of actions you have taken for their invoices or to request additional information from them. Payables provides six reports that produce supplier letters:
- Matching Hold Agent Notice. This report produces a letter notifying your purchasing agents that you cannot pay an invoice because of a price or quantity variance.
- Receiving Hold Requestor Notice. This report produces a letter notifying your purchase requestors that you cannot pay an invoice until they acknowledge that they received the product they ordered.
- Print Invoice. This report produces a letter notifying a supplier that you have entered one or more invoices for the supplier in Payables.
- Prepayment Remittance. Payables automatically prints the supplier name, address information, and any related information, such as invoice number, on each of the letters it prints.
Many of the reports include report parameters that you can use to specify custom information, such as sender name, title, and return address, each time you submit a report. In addition, each of the reports includes boilerplate text that you can customize to reflect your organization's operations.
Using Report Parameters
The Tax Information Verification Letter and the three purchase order notices provide report parameters that you use to specify the name, title, and return address of the letter sender when you submit the reports. You can define defaults for all of these report parameters to avoid having to re-enter the parameters each time you submit the reports. See: Define Concurrent Program.
Attention: Two of the reports, Print Invoice and Prepayment Remittance, do not use report parameters. For these reports, Payables includes a fictitious name and title for the sender of the letter. You should modify this boilerplate text to reflect the name(s) and title(s) of the persons in your organization responsible for sending out supplier letters.
Modifying Boilerplate Text
You can use Oracle Reports to customize any of the boilerplate text defined in a supplier letter report.
Prerequisite
You should be familiar with your Oracle Reports and Oracle Reports Designer. See: Oracle Reports User's Manual.
To make a copy of the Original Report File (Recommended):
1. In your operating system, change directories to the srw directory in the AP top level directory.
2. Make a copy of the original file for each report you want to modify and save each copy using a different name. You may also want to store the original file in a different directory or give it a new name, because Payables references the original report name when you submit a report.
The following are the file names for each supplier letter report.
| Matching Hold Agent Notice
| APXMHLET.rdf
|
| Receiving Hold Requestor Notice
| APXVDRAL.rdf
|
| Tax Information Verification Letter
| APXVDTIN.rdf
|
| Invalid PO Supplier Notice
| APXVDLET.rdf
|
| Print Invoice Report
| APXINPRT.rdf
|
| Prepayment Remittance Report
| APXPPREM.rdf
|
To load your copy into Oracle Reports Designer:
1. Start Oracle Reports Designer and use the Open File menu option to select the file you want to modify.
2. Open the report and bring up the layout window. Oracle Reports displays the report and allows you to select and manipulate objects in the layout body of the report.
Modifying Your Report
You can select any boilerplate object and use the Oracle Reports Designer text editing tool to modify the text in the object.
Suggestion: You can identify boilerplate objects by selecting objects and bringing up the property sheets. Oracle Reports displays the name and type of an object in the property sheet for the object.
You can also change the characteristics of a boilerplate object, including the length and height, to accommodate the text that you wish to add or modify. Also, you can reposition boilerplate objects within a report frame to change the format of the report.
Attention: You should exercise caution when changing the format of a report. You can cause your report to fail if you move an object outside the boundaries of the object's defined frame.
When you have finished making your changes, save the changes and exit Oracle Reports. The next time you submit the report, the modifications you made will appear in the body of the report.
Attention: You should not change any of the SQL statements in the report. Payables defines each statement to select necessary information for each report. Also, you should not change any of the functions, report settings, or names of objects that Payables defines.
